There seem to be genes that influence how our brains develop over time. A large international consortium has discovered this with an extensive study. The results of the study were recently published in Nature Neuroscience.

Museum De Lakenhal is displaying the smallest work of art in the world: a 3D-printed statue of Rembrandt van Rijn, made by sculptor Jeroen Spijker and researchers from Leiden University.

Film screening and Book Launch

Lecture, Workshop

Monique Koemans werkt sinds 2,5 jaar op de Nederlandse ambassade in de Verenigde Staten. 'Leiden is een opvallende rode draad in mijn leven.'

For a long time, even many researchers thought that guide dogs were a relatively modern invention. An accidental encounter with archival material showed university lecturer Krista Milne that guide dogs helped their blind owners as far back as the Middle Ages. Milne now has received an NWO XS grant to…

In the Spanish town of Guadalajara, there is a street named ‘Burgemeester Fluiterstraat’, named after a descendant of Leiden migrants who had done well in the South. He was not the only Guadalajara resident with Leiden roots: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a stream of Dutch textile workers…

Professor Edmund Amann will be the new Professor of Brazilian Studies. A short introduction.

If it is up to university lecturer Evelien Walhout, in a year's time we will know exactly what people from Haarlem and Zwolle died of a century ago. Together with colleagues from other universities, she started the doodsoorzaken.nl platform, where causes of death are recorded. ‘Somewhere around the…

The French political theorist Hélène Landemore has been appointed as the new Cleveringa Professor. She will deliver her inaugural lecture on 26 November.

It was a remarkable trend in 19th-century London: middle-class bourgeois bohemians falling in love with anarchism and its assassins. University lecturer Michael Newton has been awarded a NIAS subsidy to reconstruct the lives of three of these families.

Prior to arriving to Leiden, Dr. Abazon completed her Ph.D. at Yale University's Department of Comparative Literature, where she also taught courses ranging from Introduction to Zionism to World Cinema.

A cannon, a sabre, guns: these Sri Lankan objects had been in the Rijksmuseum for centuries. In early December, they were returned to Sri Lanka. Associate Professor of Colonial History Alicia Schrikker led the research that formed the basis for the restitution and published a volume on the findings…

Using enslaved people as servants, becoming an administrator in the Dutch West India Company or making uniforms for the colonial army. Many people from Leiden played a role in colonialism and slavery. Historians are conducting preliminary research and finding striking examples.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas last week. University lecturer Andrew Gawthorpe explains in an interview with ABC Radio what the embrace of 'Orbánism' means for the American right, and democracy more broadly.

Before coming to Leiden, Dr. Stökl was Reader in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament at Kings College London.

Lecture, Global Questions Seminar

Professor Caroline Vout, Cambridge University, was awarded the Leiden University Byvanck Chair in 2020. In a pre-Covid-19 world, the Byvanck Chair would stay in Leiden for seminars, lectures, and research activities. Instead, the pandemic disrupted this schedule. Last month, Vout taught her masterclass…

Lecture, LUCIS Keynote

The Leiden Research Profile Area Political Legitimacy organizes a public symposium on the 12th of May 2016 on the legitimacy and future of the Dutch Senate.

After the May elections a new University Council has now taken seat. The university democracy is the result of the long-lived national student protests in 1969. Students from Leiden joined the protests for greater representation, although their actions were less revolutionary than at other universities.…

The way the great masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries learned to draw is more similar to a present-day drawing class or book than you might think. Professor of ‘Art on Paper and Parchment’ Yvonne Bleyerveld tells us about the art of copying and model books.

Lecture

From memorials to the armed forces to memory stones for individual victims. It was only later that the Holocaust took a central role in Western remembrance culture, Cleveringa Professor Frank van Vree notes. ‘Nationalists and human rights activists both invoke the experience of the Holocaust.’

Lecture

Theft, prostitution, fortune-telling or murder. Historian Manon van der Heijden and a group of students are researching court records from The Hague from 1600 to 1800. They are tracing crimes and offenders and shedding new light on The Hague’s Gevangenpoort (or Prison Gate). Among their many discoveries…

Would you like to do collection-oriented research, but do not have sufficient resources? Every year, the Museums, Collections and Society (MCS) research group makes several research scholarships available for this purpose. Researchers Elizabeth den Hartog and Marika Keblusek previously received an MCS…

Too expensive groceries, diseases suddenly breaking out: from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, hundreds of people documented the world around them in chronicles. A significant number of these texts have been digitised in recent years. Professor of Early Modern Dutch History and project leader…

It is exactly one year ago that the university had to close, bang in the middle of the academic year. Suddenly, on that third Monday in March, we found ourselves at home, working and studying online – many of us from that cramped attic or student room. The momentous coronavirus year in pictures.

An extra-long procession with musical accompaniment will mark the beginning of the university’s 450th birthday celebrations on 7 February.

Complex research with a generous sprinkling of jargon: PhD defences can be difficult for non-experts to follow. In the compulsory new lay talk, PhD candidates begin by explaining their dissertation in words of one syllable. And it’s not just the PhD’s family and friends who appreciate this.